matociquala: All you can do as an artist is, when it's your turn, do your damnedest to tear the cord out of the motherfucking wall.

Today's tally:
* one sermon finished and delivered
* one story revised and submitted
* three new poems drafted

Also one bunch each of asparagus and baby beets roasted, a delightful coffee-break with a friend, and another friend treating me to the Panda Garden buffet in Cookeville.

Breakfast was a slice left over from last night's outing to Pizzereal. Good stuff. (One of the poems I drafted tonight was about retsina.) Maybe I simply failed to notice the combination elsewhere, but the fact that my neighborhood now has two combination pizza/Greek/Middle Eastern joints just seems way cool to me. (One of them, Italia, has become a major hangout for the precinct's cops -- there are usually several officers eating there when I pass by.)

Also, Pizzereal has beautiful wood floors and a gas fire (last night's weather was wet and dreary) and great service.

Tomorrow is not likely to be as much fun -- umpteen billable hours to crunch through, heaps of miscellaneous but must-do paperwork, and an appointment to deal with a fractured tooth. But it all can wait until I log in a good night's sleep. The better to fence with, at, and through all the double-damned ever-moving ever-maddening funhouse walls... Onwards!

* All y'all. Thank you.

* A good send-off for Jace this afternoon. Full church (300+ people); choir singing "River in Judea"; Tony Jackson and others singing "You're the First, the Last, My Everything," "Sing a Song," "YMCA," and other standards.

* "Light tea" at the very charming Savannah Tea Room with a friend this morning. For her, a pot of Assam. For me, cups of blueberry rooibos and Provence rooibos. You start out by choosing your teacup from the shelves on the wall; then the server brings by a glass filled with Devon cream and topped with a raspberry, to go with the miniature scones. For the light tea, the second course is the tea tray, which consists of fruit (grapes and slices of pineapple, kiwi, and oranges), savories (cucumber sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, carrot sticks, cheese cubes, and tuna salad in phyllo shells), and sweets (blueberry cream puffs, apple tartlets, and chocolate covered cherries). The final course (i.e., a full-size dessert) was pineapple sorbet.

* Got to chat with Bryce a bit after he and the BYM finished messing around with cars out back.

* Went to Stacy Irvin's opening at The Parthenon. The photographs that linger with me at the moment are the ones of the camels, "Slow Day" (a child in a Chinese shop), and one of a farmer straddling an irrigation ditch.

* Running into more friends while stopping at Savarino's to pick up dinner.

* Finally opening the bottle of red wine ("The Four Graces" pinot noir) given to me when my term on the church board ended last year. I'm sipping it with my plate of eggplant parm as I type.

* I technically took today off, but I did sneak in a stop at the Green Hills branch of the library. One of their current exhibits consists of some of the birdhouses for this year's W.O. Smith/Nashville Community Music School fundraiser. There are always some that are stunningly gorgeous and inventive, and others that are just laugh-out-loud funny (some of you may remember me cooing over "Hawkwarts" last year). The one that made me stop and giggle in my tracks this afternoon was "The Schroederhorn" (with Snoopy on the podium; Nashville's new symphony hall is "The Schermerhorn").

* Also on display at the library -- a number of fun-looking new children's books, including Piratepedia and Adele and Simon (a sister and brother wander around Paris...).

* Maura Stanton's "God's Ode to Creation."

Prayer for Perspective

When I last checked, the votes for the "marriage = 1 man + 1 woman" amendment to my state constitution totaled:

YES 1,407,717
NO 322,575

I've been reminding myself that some of my Unitarian abolitionist forebears must have felt like this: the percentages will be reversed someday -- possibly even within my lifetime, give or take a few generations -- but it's painful how so many people don't get how grossly unfair they're being to their neighbors and kin on this matter.

On the determinedly positive side, at least 19% of the vote was against the amendment. That's more than some people would expect ("1 in 5 Tennesseans favor marriage equality!" It's tempting to go make some heads spin, as it were...). My own precinct voted 3 to 1 against it on Election Day (816 voters), which was not a surprise but cheering nonetheless (and the totals may be even higher, since that ratio doesn't factor in ballots cast during the "early voting" period).

So. Much work to do. There will always be more work to do.

This country's growing pluralism is a blessing - one that the founders of this country could never have imagined but for which they prepared fertile ground by writing their egalitarian ideals into our foundational documents. What we should be doing in this country is continuing to expand the circle of those we include in the promises made in our Constitution. And I believe that despite the backlash we see every time the circle is widened, it never really shrinks back to where it was before.

- Bill Sinkford

And also:

We are a gentle and generous people. But let us not forget our anger. May it fuel not only our commitment to compassion but also our commitment to make fundamental changes. Our vision of the Beloved Community must stand against a vision that would allow the privilege of the few to be accepted as just and even holy. Our religious vision must again and again ask the Gospel question "Who is my neighbor" and strive always to include more and more of us as we intone the words that gave birth to this nation, "We the people..."

We are, and we should be, both a gentle, and an angry people.

- Bill Sinkford -- from a pastoral letter on Katrina, but it applies to many other things as well

I didn't get there in time for the pre-show lion-dancing, but the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth turned out to be quite good. In particular, both Macduff and Macbeth's reactions to the deaths of their wives were affecting, and the staging of the Weird Sisters was terrific -- they were in flowing backlit acid green robes (think fairytale white witches meet Morsmordre), billowing from a balcony, and they chanted rather than shrieked (something I've disliked in other productions). Also, this is the first production I've seen in which minor characters such as Ross and Lennox (sp?) came across with their own personalities -- dunno if earlier productions simply cut their scenes, if I was just more awake for this one, or if the directing brought it out. Now I want to reread the play. But not before bedtime...

The Nashville Calligraphers Guild new show at the Centennial Arts Center opened last night. I have two pieces for sale ("Come, Come, Whoever You Are" and "Praise Everything") and there's plenty of beautiful work by other Guild members on display.

The park itself is great -- there's the Parthenon, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival -- this year's show is a Japanese-influenced Macbeth, the masses of flowers and herbs lining its paths...

Both of these stickers were on the bumper of the car next to mine in a Church Street parking lot:

"I ♥ Country Boys"

"Vote NO on 1"

On the one hand, I just got back from dropping books off at the library. I keep asking the idiot in the mirror, "Haven't you learned anything over the past 15 years?" because this feeling like I'm reliving graduate school isn't healthy. There's a part of me that's well aware that I'm smarter and stronger than I ever was during my twenties, but I also keep having to fight off the feeling that I've barely made any progress at all.

On the other hand, there's a certain pleasure in observing who else happens to be out and about at 2 a.m.: aside from the usual jaywalkers and junkies, there were also a couple of youngsters dancing and snogging their way down Second Avenue.

Saw Vienna Teng in concert last week and met her afterwards. She's very pretty, very nice, and hella talented. At present, "Harbor" remains my favorite song of hers (downloadable from here), but "Shine" is what I've been replaying in the car and in my head the past couple of days:

shine with all the untold
hold the light given unto you
find the love to unfold
in this broken world we choose

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good—Bush is certainly right about that—but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation’s lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that “the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.” The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.

---

Davidson County readers: The League of Women Voters is hosting a forum for school board candidates this Thursday.

( angsting over school board choices... )

All of that said, I just now read this post, where Kay Brooks characterizes A Place at the Table as follows:

I'm of the mind that the core mission of public education is very narrow. You'll have a hard time convincing me that it includes indoctrination by the Southern Poverty Law Center via their video on civil rights. This video, we're told, equates the struggle by certain parties to have their form of mutual love accepted as on par with the struggle by people of color to obtain full personhood.

This is language similar to that used by Carolyn Baldwin Tucker (the most virulently homophobic member of Metro Council) in her ravings against homosexuality. For me, this is the deal-breaker: I will not vote for someone who shares Tucker's narrow-mindedness on this issue.

"Certain parties," indeed. That's a significant segment of my neighborhood you trivialized there, Ms. Brooks.